To produce PM's three-part Digital Family project, contributor Rebecca Day spent dozens of hours arranging to have the latest and most interesting home electronics shipped to Jamieson and Peggy Jones, who live with their two children in western Connecticut. The Joneses have spent literally hundreds of hours setting up and testing all those goodies and reporting back to Rebecca in near-daily e-mails. Here's a sampling of the correspondence (mainly by Peggy) leading up to Part II, published in the September issue of POPULAR MECHANICS magazine.

4/14/05: Hi Rebecca. Thanks for all the stuff you're getting for us. I'm totally excited about this phase of the project. We have been busy with a new soccer season, school stuff, Jami's mom moving to Florida next week, and other spring projects. Here's what I have been doing with phase two so far.

1. I took the video camera to Ben's soccer practice on Tuesday afternoon, and it was fantastic. I hadn't read any of the instructions on the unit, I just picked it up and tried it. I was really shocked at how far I could see with it and liked the feel of the wide/tele button. It's amazingly steady. The only problem I had using it was finding the play button. It looks more like a still-camera button and I wasn't expecting that. Now that I know what I'm looking for, it's easy to spot it. Anyway, it made for a few laughs with the others around me.

Also, during practice Nina loves to play at the school playground next to the soccer field, but it is a bit far away. With the camera I felt like I had a pair of binoculars! It was able to zoom into her face from about a football field away. That was nice because usually she runs off to play with other siblings and I'm a little uncomfortable with the distance. I felt much better knowing exactly what she was up to without straining to see her.

2. Loaded Ulead VideoStudio last night, read a little of the manual but have not used it yet. I think I'll use the soccer practice as the first project to try the software.

3. Cable people hooked up the HD cable box yesterday. Wow! What a difference it made on the HD channels, especially Discovery Channel. I saw a program that had lava flowing from a volcano and taped it for the kids. It was really impressive. Haven't shown them yet, but plan to. I think they'll be amazed, too. The only downer was the fact that "American Chopper" was airing on Discovery HD, a show I'm not particularly fond of but which Jami is. So, I guess I had to watch it but only because it's part of round two. On the brighter side, I think that some of my PBS shows are going to be nice to see in HD. Will give you more feedback on this as we watch.

Jami is measuring for the cable now and will call later this afternoon. Thanks again for organizing all this stuff for us and for the furniture for the TV. I'm looking forward to the systems all coming together this weekend! Will keep you posted as we progress. We'll have a lot more to say once everything is hooked up. Also, DirecTV sent the DVR unit but not the dish, so I'll let you know when that arrives. Thanks Rebecca! Peggy

4/20: Just got back in about an hour ago; dog for dinner on road, yuck. Sorry I don't have the name of the guy who called last night. This is the flat wire. Goertz. Sent me 120 ft. with four speaker ends and custom cutting tool. This stuff may look kind of odd mixed in with the Harmon Kardon (HK) stock 16-gauge wire. This wire would be great for car audio, no carpet bulge. The Sony unit came and looks the business! The new cable box woke me out of bad sleep last night. Singing hard drive! Figure TiVo will have same effect.

Listed longish cables with Monster request so as to locate boxes far from bed. Came up with neat idea for routing Monster cable on wall, using custom-made standoffs to show off high-end wire and reduce installation time. Hard drive-supported multimedia, battery backup and surge suppression would, of course be, great.

The RCA set shut off twice today while kids were watching. I don't think this was because of an outage, though. I'll run it all day tomorrow and see if I can make it happen.

Took me ages just to get Monster order straight today. Great job with all this stuff, it's quite a task. Thanks. Yours truly, Jamieson

4/25: Hi. Hope the weekend went well. Installed HK speakers and almost all wires for Niles stuff. Also all Niles speakers. Went great, I am using flat wire and it is solving some installation issues for not-new construction. Niles did not send out infrared control unit that needs to accompany wall switch. I believe it's the main system control unit: MSU250. Have enough wire left to install my old speakers in library room. The Niles distribution hub I have will accommodate one more volume control. Could you do your magic again with them? One infrared volume control, please? Also, as it applies to the volume control they already sent, do they come with their own controller? If so, and I think it would, it did not come either.

The sony DVD unit is hooked up at my desk with the plasma and a very nice HI8 DECK I already had. Peg can start burning this week.

Used TiVo while installing speakers to watch a car race. I loved the triple FF speed the unit has. No problems with the RCA stopping. Tried to surf channels on DirecTV. A joke. It takes forever for the list to scroll. I brought in the Acer tablet PC and used Web page to surf for channels. This worked. However, it did not show which would be broadcast in HD, which surfing on the TV does. Also, so many of the channels are PPV and, unlike cable, these stations are not at the end of the list, so as to be easy not to scroll through, but are in the middle. Finishing HK setup now. Thanks for your patience. Oh yeah, the cat5 wire was really great to install, very slippery jacket and extremely flexible. A 10 on my scale. Peg's writing you now, it will be off momentarily. Thx jami.

4/25: When I was in high school, my parents would often take me to Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic. Now, they have started playing in my living room Rebecca, the sound is fantastic! Jami just hooked up the speaker system and it sounds like I'm in a concert hall. Just had to tell you. It's really incredible. We're listening to classical guitar right now. Never expected quite this much of an improvement over what we had! I'm looking forward to listening to some other genres and comparing them to the pre-Harman Kardon sound. Talk to you soon, Peggy.

4/25: Hi Rebecca. It's been a whirlwind of a couple of weeks, but I think I'm back in action! Just wanted to give you some of the feedback on the equipment. Windows Media Center: I really like the front end of this software. It is so easy to use that I haven't even opened the manual to read how to use it! I made a great find last week(s) regarding the use of the Media Center to listen to NPR stations and listen to shows in the NPR archives. I was in the car and had one of those "driveway moments" NPR always talks about. Listening to a story about Billy Crystal's Uncle Milt and his involvement with early jazz recordings. I waited in my car until the story was over because it was so gripping. I thought Jami would also enjoy it and planned to find it on the PC and play it for him.

That night I was flipping through the Windows Media Center checking out new menus I'd not yet tried, and I came across the OnLine Showcase. Well, there was the NPR logo and I went to it and found the story I'd heard! It was great. I put it on my playlist, and, well, now I can't find it! I don't know if I thought I'd recorded it and didn't or if we have so many files in our playlist that I haven't been able to locate it. I'm going to keep on trying, but the archive on the media center only goes back two weeks. Initially, all I had to do to find the story was to remember what program I was listening to and the date. Then it popped right up. I was so happy to learn this because now that we are going to have speakers on the deck, I can listen to the shows I like or put them on my playlist. I'd love to be able to hear stories while I'm in the garden. I'll be interested to see whether the Web site will allow me to take a story from earlier than the two weeks the Media Center holds and somehow get it into my playlist. What a combination: being able to connect with the Earth and engage my mind in learning new things about the world!

FedEx arrived. Just got another battery backup APC 725VA, 450 watts. THANKS! I have also used the Media Center to play the photos of my mother-in-law's trip to Africa and play music from the movie "Out of Africa" as background to it. She loved this. I tried this weekend to use the Ulead software to create a DVD (as you suggested earlier, thanks) for her and it was pretty easy. However, I've had trouble with some of the details like playing the music at a specific time and coordinating the pan feature to match the picture (it's actually a scanned picture of a painting she made while on her trip). There is some text on the paintings that is really beautiful and I'd like to zero into it and fade away on some of them. I've had some trouble with applying these effects to single slides, and plan to go back to it after we reinstall the software on the Sony Vaio.